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SubStance 33.1 (2004) 108-125



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Film's Aesthetic Turn:
A Contribution from Jacques Rancière

Michèle Garneau
Université de Montréal


On the infinite contradiction, the condition of aesthetic production.
- F.W.J. Schelling

The closer we look at the state of film theory in this post-semiological era and the greater our efforts to trace its cartography, the more we recognize its object's extraordinary force. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's La mort d'Empédocle (1986), P.P. Pasolini's Oedipus Rex (1967), and Orson Welles's The Trial (1962) confound "theory," at least the kind of theory that has reigned supreme in the field of film studies until recently. Efforts to master such works, from the first film grammar to the first film semiotics, from the code to psychoanalysis, passing through semio-pragmatics, generative semiology, cognitive psychology and, most recently, narratology and textual analysis - all such attempts to organize a "cinematic system" have been powerless to grasp the film object in all its complexity.

Although Jacques Rancière does not specifically focus on these films, where the camera's peculiar visual and audible distribution "counters" and frustrates dramatic rationality, his mode of reading nevertheless allows us to grasp them in his manner. He does not present a theory of cinema, but a way of reading whose keyword is contradiction. Isn't the prologueto La fable cinématographique entitled "Une fable contrariée," a "countered fable"? And couldn't we adapt the subtitle of La parole muette to La fable cinématographique, giving us an "essay on the contradictions of film"? But "mute speech" is not only the title of Rancière's focus on the conflict of nineteenth-century conceptions of literature, but also sums up a new idea of the science of history that he first develops in a reading of Michelet, Les noms de l'histoire. The "mute witness" surfaces everywhere in Rancière's texts, whether its object is history, literature, or film, and could be read as the founding theory of thought that remains indifferent to disciplinary boundaries. From one book to another, his thought consistently re-deploys itself within different distributions and nodes of established knowledge and practice, ever taking as its point of departure the foundational event of romanticism. This "silent revolution"1 offers Rancière a forum from which to speak of the advent of a conception of literature that revokes the Belles Lettres system, of the nouvelle [End Page 108] histoire, no longer bound to great events or personages, and of the invention of film, the medium that perhaps best exemplifies this revolution's artistic ideal.

Two Contradictory Poetics

A strong conflict between two fundamental poetic powers, one of representation and another of expression, runs through Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame-de-Paris, and Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line. According to Rancière, what opposes these "two poetics is a different idea of the thought-matter relation constituting the poem, and of the language that is the place of that relation" (La parole muette, 19). In past centuries, however, the representational power first expounded in Aristotle's Poetics has garnered considerably more theoretical interest than the expressive power, whose elaboration begins in a handful of pivotal romantic texts. Around 1800, a "revolution" produces a new vision of art. Rancière gives it the name of the aesthetic regime of art, and asserts that it begins not with decisions of artistic rupture but with decisions of reinterpretation concerning what art makes and who makes art: so Vico rereads Homer, Hegel reviews Dutch painting, and Hölderlin translates Greek tragedy. "It does not replace the norms of the representational regime with other norms, but offers another interpretation of the poetic phenomenon [fait poétique]" (ibid.,13). This is how Hölderlin's Oedipus differs from that of Aristotle, Corneille or Voltaire. A new idea of tragedy is imposed, one that unquestionably finds a cinematographic equivalent in Pasolini's Oedipus Rex or Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's La...

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